Teaching English as a Foreign Language

1. TEACHING VOCABULARY
MUSFERA NARA VADIA 1300925
DINDA ATHARY HAENY 1305379

2. Current Issues
• A central debate emerging from these studies deals with whether
effective vocabulary learning should focus on explicit or implicit
learning.
• In the 1970s and 1980s, the communicate approach led naturally to a
focus on implicit, incidental learning.
• Currently, most researchers recognize that providing incidental
encounters with words is only one method of facilitating vocabulary
acquisition, and that a well-structured vocabulary program needs a
balanced approach that includes explicit teaching together with
activities providing appropriate contexts for incidental learning.

3. Explicit Learning
• In explicit vocabulary learning, students engage in activities
that focus on attention on vocabulary. There are several key
principles of explicit learning that can help guide teachers in
deciding basic questions of what to teach ad how to teach.
• These principles include the goal of building a large
recognition vocabulary, integrating new words with old,
providing number of encounters with a word, promoting a
deep level of processing, facilitating imaging, using a variety
of techniques, and encouraging independent learning
strategies.

4. Teaching Technique and Activities
• New words should not be presented in isolation and should not be
learned by simple rote memorization. It is important that new
vocabulary items be presented in contexts rich enough to provide clues
to meaning and that students be given multiple exposure to items they
should learn.
• Exercises and activities include learning words in words association lists,
focusing on highlighted words in text, semantic mapping, playing
vocabulary games.
• Teacher can add variety to the techniques employed in the classroom by
alternating other activities with language games that recycle vocabulary,
e.g., Scrabble, World Bingo, Jeopardy and so on.

5. Implicit Learning
• Incidental vocabulary learning is learning that occurs
when the mind is focused elsewhere, such as on
understanding a text or using language for
communicative purposes.

6. Vocabulary Learning Strategy
• Strategy should aid both in discovering the meaning of a
new word and in consolidating a word once it has been
encountered. Thus, learners should approach independent
learning of vocabulary by using a combination of extensive
reading and self-study.

7. Guessing Meaning from Context
• This strategy is a key vocabulary learning skill for dealing with
low-frequency vocabulary, particularly in reading authentic
texts.
• The background knowledge about the topic and the culture
greatly aid inferencing and retention by providing a framework
(“schema”) for incorporating the new word with information
already known, but even without such a background learners
can become skilled in guessing.

8. Steps for guessing meaning from context
• Clarke and Nation (1980) propose a guessing strategy based on such
clues:
a. Get the learners to look closely at the unknown word, decide the part
of speech of the unknown words, then examine the context of the
clause or sentence containing the word.
b. Look at the relationship between the clause or sentence and other
sentences or paragraphs. Signals: coordinating or subordinating
conjunction such as but, because, if, and when.
c. Using knowledge gained from such clues to guess the meaning of the
word.

9. Mnemonic Devices
• Mnemonic devices or an aid to memory help to link a word form and its
meaning and to consolidate this linkage in memory.
• There are three stages:
a. The learners choose an L1 or L2 words
b. A strong association between the target word and the keyword must
be constructed so that, when hearing or seeing the target word, the
learner is reminded immediately of the keyword.
c. A visual image of the keyword is constructed to combine the referents
of the keyword and the target word.
• The important point to remember is that the students must learn to
concentrate on remembering the image of the interaction between the
keyword and the foreign word.

10. Vocabulary Notebooks
• Schmitt and Schmitt (1995) recommend arranging the notebook in a
loose-leaf binder or index card file, in which, for instance, students write
word pairs and semantic maps which help them visualize the associative
network of relationship existing between new and familiar words.
OTHER LEARNER STRATEGIES
• Teacher can encourage students to study and practice in peer groups,
connect a word to personal experience or previous learning, say a new
word aloud when studying, use verbal and written repetition, and
engage in extended rehearsal.

11. Collocations
• Collocations consist of pairs or groups of words that co-occur with very
high frequency and are important in vocabulary learning because, as
Nattinger notes, “the meaning of a word has great deal to do with the
words with which it commonly associates.”
• Example: spoiled butter, and spoiled milk.
• Very commonly, collocations are associated pairs such as adjective-noun
or verb-noun, but it is misleading to think of them in terms of pairs only.

12. Syntactic Collocation Types
Divided into two groups;
a) Grammatical collocations are those in which a noun, verb,
or adjective frequently co-occurs with a grammatical item,
usually a prepositions. Examples: reason for, account for, rely
on and so on.
b) Lexical collocations consist of combinations of full lexical
items, i.e., nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. They
include combination such as verb + noun (spend money),
verb + adverb (laugh loudly), and adjective + adverb (deeply
absorbed).

13. Teaching Activities
• Classroom activities can be designed as the following
presentation in which collocations have been illustrated in
context, perhaps by highlighting them in passages from the
contexts, words-match activities can help in consolidating the
patterns, gap-filling activities can also be included in exercises.

14. Idioms
• Idioms are multiword units that are completely fixed. They are further
distinguished an having a unitary meaning of the component parts.
This unitary meaning is the main characteristic that sets idioms apart
from ordinary collocation, in which the meanings do reflect the
meaning of each constituent part.
• Idioms are a commonly occurring type of multiword unit in English,
especially in informal conversational settings, and should not be
ignored in vocabulary studies.
• Activities for the classroom could include presentation in authentic
texts, such as daily newspaper cartoons/ comic strips and dialogues
from modern drama, and other exercises.

15. Lexical Phrases
• Lexical phrase is a ‘chunk’ of language of varying length,
conventionalized form/ function composites that occur more
frequently and have more idiomatically determined meaning than
language that is put together from the scratch. Some are completely
fixed expressions such as by the way, how do you do?, give me a
break.
• Type of Lexical Phrases:
• Social interactions: greeting/closing, politeness/routines, requesting,
complying.
• Necessary topics: language, time, location.
• Discourse devices: logical connectors, temporal connectors, qualifiers,
relators, exemplifiers, and so on.

16. Why Teach Lexical Phrases
• Lexical phrases offer various advantages for teaching conversation and
other types of discourse. For example: they allow for expressions that
learners may as yet be unable to construct creatively, they can help
learners ease frustration and promote motivation and sense of
fluency.
• Another advantages is that they can first be learned as unsegmented
wholes, together with their discourse functions, and in later
encounters can be analyzed and learned as individual words, thus
providing additional vocabulary.

17. Teaching Activities
• One way of teaching lexical phrases is to start with a few basic fixed
routines, which learners then analyze as increasingly variable patterns
as they exposed to more varied phrases.
• The next step is controlled variation in using basic phrases with the
help of simple substitution drills to demonstrate that the chunks
learned previously are not invariable routines, but instead patterns
with open slots.

18. SOME GUIDELINES FOR THE COMMUNICATIVE TREATMENT OF
VOCABULARY INSTRUCTION
1. ALLOCATE SPECIFIC CLASS TIME TO VOCABULARY LEARNING.
• Words are basic building blocks of language; in fact, survival level
communication can take place quite intelligibly when people simply
string words together- without any grammatical rules applying at all!
2. HELP STUDENTS TO LEARN VOCABULARY IN CONTEXT
• The best internalization of vocabulary comes from encounters
(comprehension or production) with words within the context of
surrounding discourse. Rather than isolating words and/or focusing on
dictionary definitions, attend to vocabulary within a communicative
framework in which items appear.

19. 3. PLAY DOWN THE ROLE OF BILINGUAL DICTIONARIES.
• A collolary to the above is to help students to resist the temptation to
overuse their bilingual dictionaries. In recent years, with the common
availability of electronic pocket dictionaries, students are even more
easily tempted to punch in a word they don’t know and get an instant
response.
4. ENCOURAGE STUDENTS TO DEVELOP STRATEGIES FOR DETERMINING
THE MEANING OF WORDS.
• A number of “clues” are available to learners to develop “word attack”
strategies.

20. 5. ENGANGE IN “UNPLANNED” VOCABULARY TEACHING.
• In all likelihood, most of the attention you give to vocabulary learning
will be unplanned: those moments when a student asks about a word or
when a word has appeared that you feel deserves some attention.
• Sometimes, such impromptu moments may be extended: the teacher
gives several examples, and/or encourages students to use the word in
other sentences. Make sure that such unplanned teaching, however,
does not detract from the central focus of activity by going on and on.